The online home of Paul McNamara: Nurse. Educator. Digital Citizen.

Tag Archives: prezi

This post is a companion piece to my oral presentation at the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control 5th International Conference, 20 -23 November 2016, Pullman & Mercure Melbourne Albert Park. The conference hashtag is #ACIPC16. The function of the online version is to be a collection point to list references/links.

The Prezi is intended as an oral presentation, so I do not intend to include a full description of the content here.

Regular visitors to meta4RN.com will recognise some familiar themes. Let’s not call it self-plagiarism (such an ugly term), I would rather think of it as a new, funky remix of a favourite old song. Due to this remixing of old content I’ve included lots of previous meta4RN.com blog posts on the reference list (which, in turn, makes the reference list look stupidly self-referential). Anyway, with that embarrassing disclosure, here is the abstract and list of references for the Prezi https://prezi.com/fcjda3fh9etr/twitter-is-a-vector

Communication is an inherent part of being a health professional. Over time we have our adapted to the communication technologies available to us: telephones, fax machines, emails and videoconferencing. Yet, for some of us, there seems to be hesitation to use one of the technologies of our time – social media – in a similarly confident manner.

Perhaps you have heard a health professional say something like, “Twitter doesn’t interest me – I don’t care what Justin Bieber had for breakfast.” Those people speak that way because they don’t have a clear understanding of the difference between personal, official and professional use of Twitter.

This presentation is a blatant hard-sell regarding professional use of social media. Examples of professional use of Twitter being used to augment education, conferences, health promotion, academia and the profile of health professionals will be presented.

Please use the conference hashtag – #ACIPC16 – if live-Tweeting during this presentation.

Finally, a big thank you to the Australasian College for Infection Prevention and Control 2016 conference organisers for inviting me to #ACIPC16. Special thanks to the Chair of the Scientific Committee Brett Mitchell (aka @1healthau on Twitter).

This post is the companian peice to a Prezi of the same name, and serves mostly as a collection point for references and thanks.

The Prezi is intended as an oral presentation, so I do not intend to include a full description of the content here. After watching the Prezi/hearing the presentation regular visitors to meta4RN.com will recognise some familiar themes. Let’s not call it self-plagarism (such an ugly term), I would rather think of it as a new, funky remix of a favourite old song. Due to this remixing of old content I’ve included previous meta4RN.com blog posts on the reference list.

I am more than just a bit embarrassed at how self-referential the Prezi/my presentation is. Not only does this make me look like a total narcissist, it also calls the credibility of the presentation into question. I’ll need to cop those criticisms on the chin until more Australian mental health nurses provide examples of professional use of social media. When that happens, I intend to replace some of the meta4RN content of the Prezi with that of other Australian mental health nurses.

Thanks

Thanks to all those who contributed to the Prezi/presentation either directly or indirectly. There are too many to name at the moment [I have a deadline looming], but you’ll see glimpses of their names and faces on Twitter, Blogs and Facebook as you look through the Prezi. These are some of the people that make using social media such a pleasure. When I have time, I intend to come back and list all the contributors below:

New South Wales Nurses and Midwives Association [nswnma]. (2014, July 30). Women now have unmediated access to public conversation via social media for 1st time in history @JaneCaro #NSWNMAconf14 #destroythejoint [Tweet]. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/nswnma/status/494313737575096321

Sigmund Freud is purported to have said, “Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.” Not every nursing speciality has this advantage of being informed and sustained by artists. Can those of us interested in supporting mental health consumers and carers look to art to improve our understanding and empathy of the experiences of others?

I have created a Prezi as a seed for others to use art as an adjunct to our other sources of learning (courses, colleagues, peer-reviewed journals, text books etc). Please see the Prezi by following the link here.

The examples I have collated in the Prezi are listed below, and credit is given to the sources that were used in the Prezi.

I had a black dog, his name was depression is written, illustrated and narrated by Matthew Johnstone. It is a very accessible way think about depression and would resonate with a broad age group, I think. Here is the YouTube video used in the Prezi:

Laika by Arcade Fire may not have been written about mental illness at all. However, as with all art, interpretation is an individual experience. I have had a few years experience as a community mental health nurse. In that role I provided direct care and support to the person experiencing mental health problems (nearly all of my clients at the time had schizophrenia) and, when family were still around, support for them too.

Much of the word imagery of Laika fits with that experience. Carers often described their frustration at the lack of insight and empathy that their family member seemed to have. Carers would oscillate between deep concern and desperate frustration about their family member. More than a few times carers expressed a nihilistic outlook – an almost complete lack of hope. The line “Our mother should’ve just named you Laika” expresses that poignantly: Laika was the name of a stray dog in Moscow who became the first living creature to orbit earth. She was never expected to return to earth safely, and died a few hours after launch. Families I have worked with have, at times, expressed that level of despair about their family member.

I also like how Laika’s story has been taken-up by the art community. I love the Arcade Fire song, and my favourite visual representation of Laika – First Dog in Space is the painting above by Belgian artist Paul Gosselin.

The last piece of art I used in the Prezi was The Scream by Edvard Munch. The source of the picture is here: www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch/munch.scream.jpg I’ve read that this picture has been associated with other health problems including trigeminal neuralgia, psychosis and depersonalisation. To my eye, The Scream looks like acute anxiety and/or a panic attack. It serves as a graphic visual reminder that the first step is to assist the person to contain their distress, to be and feel safe. It shows distress that must feel overwhelming and rallies us to help: let’s think “safety first” kids.

The perinatal mental health workshop goes for 4 hours, with three scheduled 5-10 minute breaks. It has been repeated and refined dozens of times over the last 12 years (pretty sure I did the first one in 2001). I haven’t kept count of how many people have done it – it would be a number somewhere either side of 300, I guess. The workshop is based on adult learning principles and is divided into two parts: knowing (empirical learnings) and doing (experiential learning). An example of the flyer/agenda for the workshop is here (PDF). The primary message I want (hope) participants to take home is that by being authentic, emotionally intelligent professionals we can make our screening more sensitive and our responses more therapeutic.

In the perinatal mental health workshop we talk together. There is nearly always more than 100 years of clinical experience in the room, sometimes there is over 200 years of experience in the room.

There is no powerpoint presentation. There are nurses, midwives, indigenous health workers and allied health staff. We share our knowledge, our experiences and our stories with each other as a group. There is a lot of information to get through; the workshop facilitator’s job is to keep the mutual sharing of information safe, and to give it structure, credibility and meaning. The facilitator makes sure to keep the agenda and the learning objectives on track. As is befitting of an adult education session, the workshop is a conversation.

Maybe Twitter is just another conversation. A conversation not as intimate or in-depth as the one held in the workshop, but a conversation that isn’t restricted to one specific place or one specific group of people.

As an experiment on 8th February 2013 I used social media (this Twitter account linked to a Facebook page) to bookmark resources for participants and share them with anyone else who is interested. Using HootSuite 19 pre-scheduled Tweets with the #bePNDaware hashtag were sent before or during the workshop. One Tweet was sent during a break in the Workshop (the one about Circle of Security – I was rushing and sent a broken link – oops), and one after the workshop had finished (the one with the photo of the whiteboard).

The scheduling of tweets allowed the facilitator to be fully present during the workshop, while simultaneously making links to the resources/topics discussed in the workshop readily available to workshop participants and a broader audience.

9 other Twitter accounts retweeted 6 of the original tweets; the tweet re the Clinical Practice Guidelines was retweeted 3 times. In all, between 7:00am and 7:00pm on 08/02/13 (Cairns time) there were 30 workshop-related Tweets which, through the compounding effects of social media, yielded a theoretical/potential reach of 17,783 (source). The actual impact would have been much smaller, but is difficult to quantify (for me, anyway).

To see who joined the conversation by retweeting and other data, please visit Symplur.

That’s it for this attempt to use a 4 minute video to give a glimpse of a 4 hour workshop, and to share the idea of using social media as a tool to expand the reach of an education session.

Want to hear something funny? Of the workshop participants that day, two were on a self-imposed period of respite from Facebook, and none of them used Twitter. The experiment in social-media-enhanced-education was more useful to people away from the workshop than in it. Oh well – at least I can send the participants a link to the video now…